Thin pamphlets

These are 5.5" by 8.5" pamphlets. They are thin enough to print yourself if you have a duplex printer for double sided printing. For example, a 20 page pamphlet takes 5 sheets of paper at 4 pages per sheet.

Download the original Word document. To print a pamphlet open the Word doc file, choose print, choose your printer, the click on Properties. Be sure Duplex is selected. Then, depending on what you see, choose the Advanced tab, then click on the icon for booklets. The default is Flip on Left Edge. Change this to Flip on Top Edge. Click OK, choose the number of copies (start with 1 for testing), the click OK to start printing. If all goes well you now have a set of pages for each pamphlet.

Next align the pages for one booklet. Then fold the booklet with your hands. Crease the center fold with your fingernail. Finally use a saddle stapler to put two staples in the fold line, about 1" from each end.

Striking at the Root with Common Property Rights - 2012 - 8 pages

This pamphlet PDF is for reading and this pamphlet DOC is for duplex printing, folding, and stapling. It's designed to be printed on a color printer.

Read this pamphlet before the one below. They cover the same solution element.

"Striking at the root" means finding and resolving the root causes of a problem. The pamphlet explains how we can do that with Common Property Rights. Here's how the pamphlet begins:

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." ~ Henry David Thoreau

MILLIONS OF DEDICATED ENVIRONMENTALISTS have worked on the sustainability problem for generations. Countless and frequently brilliant solutions have been tried. While some have worked at the local level, and a few have worked at the international level like the stratospheric ozone layer problem, none have worked at the systemic level. Problems like climate change, deforestation, desertification, freshwater shortages, and thousands of types of pollution are growing worse with no solution in sight.

Why?

Because popular solutions do not resolve root causes.

Bringing the Power of the Law to Environmental Stewardship with Common Property Rights - 2012 - 20 pages

This pamphlet PDF is for reading and this pamphlet DOC is for duplex printing, folding, and stapling. It's designed to be printed on a color printer.

The pamphlet describes a solution element that's ready to implement: Common Property Rights. For more information than what's in the pamphlet see The Common Property Rights Project.

Here's how the pamphlet begins:

DESPITE THE EFFORTS OF MILLIONS OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS for over forty years, the sustainability problem is growing worse with no solution in sight. The world’s Ecological Footprint is now at about 50% overshoot with no sign of dropping to a sustainable level in time to avoid collapse. We’re winning a few battles but losing the war.

So what can we do?

We can try a systemic solution.

COMMON PROPERTY RIGHTS is a comprehensive system for managing the world's common property sustainably. That’s a dry definition, but its benefits are anything but dry. The great advantage of Common Property Rights over other solutions is:

It’s efficient – It's the mirror image of the world's already existing Private Property Rights system, so it promises to be just as supremely efficient.

It’s generic – It applies to all types of environmental problems, just like Private Property Rights applies to all types of private property.

It’s self-replicating – Once the solution is in place it's designed to naturally spread to include and solve all the world's environmental sustainability problems, including those unknown today.

The pamphlet was written especially for the Sierra Club and contains specific references to how that organization can benefit from these tools. The message, however, applies to all environmental organizations as shown in this passage:

"In difficult social problems, change resistance is the crux. It must be solved first because until change resistance is overcome proper coupling is impossible."

"This is an important insight that once fully accepted will have deep ramifications. The Sierra Club’s many campaigns will have little effect on the overall sustainability problem until the change resistance subproblem is solved. This implies a refocus of how the club is organized. Currently there is no significant analysis function of the problems the club is working on. That void can be filled the same way business handles its own analysis problem: by creation of a well staffed, well funded, process driven R&D department. The output of R&D becomes the input for the club’s main departments of conservation and communications—just as the output of R&D feeds manufacturing and marketing in the business world."

The New Dominant Life Form 2011 - 4 pages

Unbeknowest to most citizens Homo sapiens is no longer the dominant life form on the planet. That role has been taken over by another life form, who is now the New Dominant Life Form. This is the modern large for-profit corporation. Because their goals are fundamentally opposed to those of humans, the system works for their benefit and not ours. This explains why the sustainability problem (as well as many other problems whose solution would benefit the common good instead of large for-profit corporations) has so far been impossible to solve.

The highlight of the pamphlet is The Competitive Advantage of Two Life Forms table. This compares the competitive advantage of The Modern Corporation to Homo sapiens. Poor Homo sapiens. He doesn't stand a chance. Unless, of course, something changes. The pamphlet briefly discusses how this can be done using the Corporation 2.0 solution element.

A Little Story about Corporate Dominance and the Occupy Movement 2011 - 16 pages

NOTE - This is the pamphlet version of the online article by the same name. The online version is much more readable. We suggest you try that version unless you are considering printing pamphlets.

In late 2011 and early 2012 this online article briefly became the most popular article on Thwink.org. Its appearance coincided with the Occupy and Move to Amend movements, since the article was designed to strengthen the long term success of those movements.

A number of people have gotten excited about the insights in the article and related info at Thwink. One wrote:

"I joined Move To Amend and organized the (name of organization) affiliate, thinking I was striking at the root cause of our problem. Now after reading thwink.org, I realize I am not and have begun rethinking my approach by further study of the website."

Another said:

"I knew your arguments were sounding familiar. I looked your site over last week and feel like I could spend a week of intense study on it. I feel like the entire Occupy movement should spend time in it, and we can help that with our (name of organization) Facebook page that we've only just begun. We'll use the video you created and basically push your site as an essential resource."

Just as many have reacted against it, saying things like "Wow Jack. What a downer." and "Why so pessimistic?" But the one that astonished me was this message: (The bolded sentence was underlined in the original.)

"I caution you about these writings. People will accept only want they are ready to accept. At the moment, people are ready to accept that Citizens United and Corporate Personhood have stolen our democracy. People are ready to accept that Citizens United can be overturned by a constitutional amendment. The Move to Amend movement has caught fire as evidenced by over 300 demonstrations; plus the Sierra Club and other powerful advocacy groups have come on board."

"You argue that overturning corporate personhood will not completely solve the problem with which I may agree; however, people are not ready to accept that. Not yet. I urge you to not throw water on this very small flame that is the Move to Amend movement. ... Do not douse the spark of our movement before it if a full ranging fire."

What we see here is paradigm change resistance, ironically from those who need this information the most so they can overcome change resistance to the solutions they are proposing.

This brings to mind one of the most famous quotes in the advancement of science:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is
violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.
~ Attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer

Thick pamphlets

These are 6" by 9" pamphlets. They are so thick (due to so many pages) that you can't print them yourself unless you have a really good saddle stapler and can hand fold a thick stack of pages well, or a few sheets at a time.

We have high quality copies of these from a printer for sale. The cover is in color. The interior pages are black and white. The pages are heavy duty, making these thick pamphlets like a little book. Please contact us to order copies at $3.00 each plus postage.

Truth or Deception - 2011 48 pages

This pamphlet PDF is for reading and this pamphlet DOC is for duplex printing, folding, and stapling. This pamphlet is available in printed form for $3.00 each plus postage. If you're using the DOC file you will need this free font: Roman Antique.

The pamphlet is written the style of Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense. It has the same number of pages: 46, plus the front and back cover. It's written for a purpose just as vital: how a nation can throw off the bonds of oppression. Common Sense did it by telling the colonies the truth about what England was doing to them and their probable future if that relationship continued. Truth or Deception does it by providing citizens with a simple tool to tell truth from deception: the Truth Test. The truth, once seen with your own eyes, is that in America and many other nations the population is being deceived and oppressed by the New Dominant Life Form.

The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace 2005 - 44 pages

This pamphlet PDF is for reading and this pamphlet DOC is for duplex printing, folding, and stapling. This pamphlet is available in printed form for $3.00 each plus postage. If you're using the DOC file you will need this free font: Roman Antique.

This is a reprint of the most popular document on Thwink.org: the unpublished Dueling Loops paper of 2005. Front and back covers have been added to more completely describe the paper's context. It's essentially an answer to the question "Why not try root cause analysis?" as explained on the back cover. Click on the back cover to read a large copy of the image.

The analysis was performed over a seven year period from 2003 to 2010. The results are summarized in the Summary of Analysis Results, the top of which is shown below:

Click on the table for the full table and a high level discussion of analysis results.

The Universal Causal Chain

This is the solution causal chain present in all problems. Popular approaches to solving the sustainability problem see only what's obvious: the black arrows. This leads to using superficial solutions to push on low leverage points to resolve intermediate causes.

Popular solutions are superficial because they fail to see into the fundamental layer, where the complete causal chain runs to root causes. It's an easy trap to fall into because it intuitively seems that popular solutions like renewable energy and strong regulations should solve the sustainability problem. But they can't, because they don't resolve the root causes.

In the analytical approach, root cause analysis penetrates the fundamental layer to find the well hidden red arrow. Further analysis finds the blue arrow.Fundamental solution elements are then developed to create the green arrow which solves the problem. For more see Causal Chain in the glossary.

This is no different from what the ancient Romans did. It’s a strategy of divide and conquer. Subproblems like these are several orders of magnitude easier to solve because you are no longer trying (in vain) to solve them simultaneously without realizing it. This strategy has changed millions of other problems from insolvable to solvable, so it should work here too.

For example, multiplying 222 times 222 in your head is for most of us impossible. But doing it on paper, decomposing the problem into nine cases of 2 times 2 and then adding up the results, changes the problem from insolvable to solvable.

Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied.

Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem, because if the system is resisting change then none of the other subproblems are solvable. Therefore this subproblem must be solved first. Until it is solved, effort to solve the other three subproblems is largely wasted effort.

The root cause of successful change resistance appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace. Too many voters and politicians are being deceived into thinking sustainability is a low priority and need not be solved now.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We need to inoculate people against deceptive false memes because once people are infected by falsehoods, it’s very hard to change their minds to see the truth.

Life form improper coupling occurs when two social life forms are not working together in harmony.

In the sustainability problem, large for-profit corporations are not cooperating smoothly with people. Instead, too many corporations are dominating political decision making to their own advantage, as shown by their strenuous opposition to solving the environmental sustainability problem.

The root cause appears to be mutually exclusive goals. The goal of the corporate life form is maximization of profits, while the goal of the human life form is optimization of quality of life, for those living and their descendents. These two goals cannot be both achieved in the same system. One side will win and the other side will lose. Guess which side is losing?

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause follows easily. If the root cause is corporations have the wrong goal, then the high leverage point is to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

The world’s solution model for solving important problems like sustainability, recurring wars, recurring recessions, excessive economic inequality, and institutional poverty has drifted so far it’s unable to solve the problem.

The root cause appears to be low quality of governmental political decisions. Various steps in the decision making process are not working properly, resulting in inability to proactively solve many difficult problems.

This indicates low decision making process maturity. The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise the maturity of the political decision making process.

In the environmental proper coupling subproblem the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. Environmental impact from economic system growth has exceeded the capacity of the environment to recycle that impact.

This subproblem is what the world sees as the problem to solve. The analysis shows that to be a false assumption, however. The change resistance subproblem must be solved first.

The root cause appears to be high transaction costs for managing common property (like the air we breath). This means that presently there is no way to manage common property efficiently enough to do it sustainably.

The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to allow new types of social agents (such as new types of corporations) to appear, in order to radically lower transaction costs.

Solutions

There must be a reason popular solutions are not working.

Given the principle that all problems arise from their root causes, the only possible reason popular solutions are not working (after over 40 years of millions of people trying) is popular solutions do not resolve root causes.

This is Thwink.org’s most fundamental insight.

Summary of Solution Elements

Using the results of the analysis as input, 12 solutions elements were developed. Each resolves a specific root cause and thus solves one of the four subproblems, as shown below:

Click on the table for a high level discussion of the solution elements and to learn how you can hit the bullseye.

The 4 Subproblems

The solutions you are about to see differ radically from popular solutions, because each resolves a specific root cause for a single subproblem. The right subproblems were found earlier in the analysis step, which decomposed the one big Gordian Knot of a problem into The Four Subproblems of the Sustainability Problem.

Everything changes with a root cause resolution approach. You are no longer firing away at a target you can’t see. Once the analysis builds a model of the problem and finds the root causes and their high leverage points, solutions are developed to push on the leverage points.

Because each solution is aimed at resolving a specific known root cause, you can't miss. You hit the bullseye every time. It's like shooting at a target ten feet away. The bullseye is the root cause. That's why Root Cause Analysis is so fantastically powerful.

The high leverage point for overcoming change resistance is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We have to somehow make people truth literate so they can’t be fooled so easily by deceptive politicians.

This will not be easy. Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first, so it takes nine solution elements to solve this subproblem. The first is the key to it all.

B. How to Achieve Life Form Proper Coupling

In this subproblem the analysis found that two social life forms, large for-profit corporations and people, have conflicting goals. The high leverage point is correctness of goals for artificial life forms. Since the one causing the problem right now is Corporatis profitis, this means we have to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.

Corporations were never designed in a comprehensive manner to serve the people. They evolved. What we have today can be called Corporation 1.0. It serves itself. What we need instead is Corporation 2.0. This life form is designed to serve people rather than itself. Its new role will be that of a trusted servant whose goal is providing the goods and services needed to optimize quality of life for people in a sustainable manner.

What’s drifted too far is the decision making model that governments use to decide what to do. It’s incapable of solving the sustainability problem.

The high leverage point is to greatly improve the maturity of the political decision making process. Like Corporation 1.0, the process was never designed. It evolved. It’s thus not quite what we want.

The solution works like this: Imagine what it would be like if politicians were rated on the quality of their decisions. They would start competing to see who could improve quality of life and the common good the most. That would lead to the most pleasant Race to the Top the world has ever seen.

Presently the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. The high leverage point is allow new types of social agents to appear to radically reduce the cost of managing the sustainability problem.

This can be done with non-profit stewardship corporations. Each steward would have the goal of sustainably managing some portion of the sustainability problem. Like the way corporations charge prices for their goods and services, stewards would charge fees for ecosystem service use. The income goes to solving the problem.

Corporations gave us the Industrial Revolution. That revolution is incomplete until stewards give us the Sustainability Revolution.

This analyzes the world’s standard political system and explains why it’s operating for the benefit of special interests instead of the common good. Several sample solutions are presented to help get you thwinking.

Note how generic most of the tools/concepts are. They apply to far more than the sustainability problem. Thus the glossary is really The Problem Solver's Guide to Difficult Complex System Social Problems, using the sustainability problem as a running example.